Slashdot Mirror

"The Surrey Space Center successfully used a net to capture a piece of artificial space junk in orbit for the first time in history on Sunday," writes Slashdot reader dmoberhaus. "The video was just released Wednesday and is quite stunning."

"Not only does the net look cool as hell, it's addressing a major problem for the future of space exploration," reports Motherboard: The test was carried about by the RemoveDEBRIS satellite, an experimental space debris removal platform built by an international consortium of space companies and university research centers. There are tens of thousands of pieces of fast-moving space junk in orbit, which range from the centimeter-scale all the way to entire rocket stages. Some of these pieces are moving faster than a bullet and all of them pose a serious danger to other satellites and crewed capsules... Removing this junk from orbit is particularly challenging because of the various sizes of the debris, its erratic tumbling motion, and the fact that some pieces are moving as fast as 30,000 miles per hour.
The successful experiment follows six years of Earth-based testing, according to a professor at the lead research institution, the Surrey Space Centre.

"While it might sound like a simple idea, the complexity of using a net in space to capture a piece of debris took many years of planning, engineering and coordination."

Mark.JUK writes A team of Scientists working at the University of Surrey in England claim to have achieved, via an experimental lab test, performance of 1Tbps (Terabit per second) over their candidate for a future 5G Mobile Broadband technology. Sadly the specifics of the test are somewhat unclear, although it's claimed that the performance was delivered by using 100MHz of radio spectrum bandwidth over a distance of 100 metres. The team, which forms part of the UK Government's 5G Innovation Centre, is supported by most of the country's major mobile operators as well as BT, Samsung, Fujitsu, Huawei, the BBC and various other big names in telecoms, media and mobile infrastructure. Apparently the plan is to take the technology outside of the lab for testing between 2016 and 2017, which would be followed by a public demo in early 2018. In the meantime 5G solutions are still being developed, with most in the early experimental stages, by various different teams around the world. Few anticipate a commercial deployment happening before 2020 and we're still a long way from even defining the necessary standard.

Mark.JUK writes A team of Scientists working at the University of Surrey in England claim to have achieved, via an experimental lab test, performance of 1Tbps (Terabit per second) over their candidate for a future 5G Mobile Broadband technology. Sadly the specifics of the test are somewhat unclear, although it's claimed that the performance was delivered by using 100MHz of radio spectrum bandwidth over a distance of 100 metres. The team, which forms part of the UK Government's 5G Innovation Centre, is supported by most of the country's major mobile operators as well as BT, Samsung, Fujitsu, Huawei, the BBC and various other big names in telecoms, media and mobile infrastructure. Apparently the plan is to take the technology outside of the lab for testing between 2016 and 2017, which would be followed by a public demo in early 2018. In the meantime 5G solutions are still being developed, with most in the early experimental stages, by various different teams around the world. Few anticipate a commercial deployment happening before 2020 and we're still a long way from even defining the necessary standard.

mikejuk writes to let us know that today is Pi Day — 3/14 in American date notation. He writes, "This year, it feels as though we aren't celebrating alone. For the first time, it looks as if momentum has built up to the point where people have heard about Pi Day. There are even attempts to sell you Pi-related items as if it was a real holiday. But there is always some one to spoil the party so what ever you do to celebrate don't miss Vi Hart's Anti-Pi Rant video." Thus begins the yearly debate over Pi Day vs. Tau Day (June 28). Phil Plait has a post defending Pi Day's honor, and MIT isn't holding back their Pi Day celebrations. Large-scale celebration of Pi Day began in 1988, mostly through the efforts of physicists Larry Shaw and Ron Hipschmann at the San Francisco Exploratorium. The Exploratorium still runs Pi Day events 26 years later, including Pi-themed processions and pie for dessert. In 2009, Pi Day became semi-official through a vote by the House of Representatives. (They did a better job with Pi than did Indiana, who almost legislated it to be 3.2.)

The best way to celebrate Pi Day is to get together with some friends and talk math over a pie. You could even go for a pizza pie, since a pizza with radius 'z' and height 'a' has volume = pi * z * z * a. If you'd care for a game, head over to the Pi Day Challenge, which features a series of pi-related logic puzzles. Or just spend the day learning about pi.

Cool pi facts: Pi is currently known to about 10 billion decimal places. You can calculate pi using the Fibonacci sequence. A few years ago, Steven Rochen mapped the digits of pi to musical notes and turned it into a violin solo (video). Others have made music from pi as well. Mankind didn't know the first hundred digits of pi until the year 1701. How many digits of pi can you recite? The record for memorization currently stands at 67890 digits. The record for reciting pi while juggling three balls is just under 10,000.

krou writes "A team from Surrey Space Centre has developed a device called a CubeSail, designed to be attached to satellites and rocket stages in order to drag space debris from orbit. CubeSail is a nanosatellite, weighing 3kg (6.6lb), and measures 10cm x 10cm x 30cm. Within its frame is a polymer sheet that unfurls itself once in space. 'The simple deployment mechanism features four metal strips that are wound under tension and will snap into a straight line when let go, pulling the sheet flat in the process.' The overall idea is that 'Residual air molecules still present in the spacecraft's low-Earth orbit will catch the sheet and pull the object out of the sky much faster than is normal.' Sir Martin Sweeting, the chairman of SSTL, who supported the research, said, 'We would be looking to put it on our own satellites and to put it on other people's spacecraft as well. We want this to be a standard, essential bolt-on item for a spacecraft; and that's why it's very important to make it small, because if it's too big it will interfere with the rest of the spacecraft.' The team is also hoping that CubeSail can act as a propulsion system, using 'solar sailing' to help satellites keep their orbits more efficiently."

Anonymous Coward writes "After Vint Cerf planned the Interplanetary Internet, there's a press release saying that the Interplanetary Internet is now being tested in space, using the Bundle Protocol developed by the Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group. There's a conference paper with details on the testing too. These guys were previously the first to test IPv6 in space. Now they've found something with even fewer users than IPv6 to play with!"

A number of readers wrote in about the launch this morning of a Japanese H-2A rocket carrying a Kizuna ("Winds") satellite into orbit. Kizuna is intended to provide "super high-speed data transmission" for Japan and Southeast Asia. The news stories on the launch, such as the AP's linked here, are short on technical detail. For example they say the satellite successfully achieved orbit 175 miles above the earth — hardly suitable for Internet communications to a specific area on the surface (remember Teledesic?). Reader nebulus4 provided a link to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency site with an illustration and a little more detail. Such as the fact that Kizuna is destined for geosync orbit, and that a 45-cm antenna will equip eventual users for 155 Mbps down / 6 Mbps up, whereas a 5-m antenna will allow enterprises and ISPs to tap into 1.2 Gbps down. Given the latency to geosync orbit, you probably wouldn't want to use Kizuna to play an online shooter.

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Physicists from both the University of Surrey and Salford University have devised a method to trap a multi-colored rainbow of light inside a prism. "Previous attempts to slow and capture light have involved extremely low or cryogenic temperatures, have been extremely costly, and have only worked with one specific frequency of light at a time. The technique proposed by Professor Hess and Mr Kosmas Tsakmakidis involves the use of negative refractive index metamaterials along with the exploitation of the Goos Hänchen effect, which shows that when light hits an object or an interface between two media it does not immediately bounce back but seems to travel very slightly along that object, or in the case of metamaterials, travels very slightly backwards along the object."

lloydwood writes "The UoSAT-2/UO-11 small satellite was launched into low Earth orbit on 1 March 1984 from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Twenty years later, it's still in orbit and operational -- and we recently found launch footage. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of starting in orbit, the original video celebrating the UoSAT-2 launch is available (in windows media and mpeg). Thrill to the computers, the clothes, and the haircuts of 1984. SSTL has launched more than twenty satellites since."

lloydwood writes "The UoSAT-2/UO-11 small satellite was launched into low Earth orbit on 1 March 1984 from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Twenty years later, it's still in orbit and operational -- and we recently found launch footage. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of starting in orbit, the original video celebrating the UoSAT-2 launch is available (in windows media and mpeg). Thrill to the computers, the clothes, and the haircuts of 1984. SSTL has launched more than twenty satellites since."

VernonNemitz asks: "Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) have been around for decades, and they come in all colors. Here are the basic principles behind their operation, information on what's currently in production , and other practical info. Now, you would think it obvious that video displays should be made from LEDs, to take on the various competitors. Certainly this has been done on a large scale, and I am not the first to be interested in LED display technology for home viewing. The apparent goal of silicon LEDs these days seems to be tied up with optical communications between circuits, have they forgotten the possibility of making high-resolution display panels?"

"Achieving a good image will require smaller pixels, and now I have a better understanding of what has been holding it up, so would like to share what I found out. Basically, unlike a lot of electronic technology, LEDs are mostly -not- made from silicon. So, while silicon diodes are common, and large arrays of them are also made (for sensors), LEDs are not easy to incorporate into standard integrated-circuit manufacturing. Nevertheless, researchers have been pursuing and steadily making progress toward integrating silicon-based LEDs. Even whole arrays, 'suitable for large two-dimensional areas', of silicon laser LEDs have been made, as far back as three years ago."

dsmalle writes "Dr. Rebecca Hoyle from Surrey University in England has derived a formula for reverse parking your car. A lot of insurance companies would welcome an initiative to automate parking using this formula I guess. I'm sure somebody must have tried to do this before, so why don't we see this in cars?" New York drivers know that a space that's the length of your car plus six inches is plenty of room. :)

dsmalle writes "Dr. Rebecca Hoyle from Surrey University in England has derived a formula for reverse parking your car. A lot of insurance companies would welcome an initiative to automate parking using this formula I guess. I'm sure somebody must have tried to do this before, so why don't we see this in cars?" New York drivers know that a space that's the length of your car plus six inches is plenty of room. :)

Dima Barsky writes "There is a rumour that Hewlett-Packard is going to split into two companies " According to several stories, they may be planning a new division aimed at internet-related hardware.